An Amazon Echo owner has tried to get a television advertising campaign for the smart speaker banned after the Alexa virtual assistant attempted to order cat food when it heard its name on an ad.

An Amazon TV ad for the Echo Dot, which can perform functions such as make shopping lists and play music with voice commands, features people using the device in different situations. In one a man’s voice says: “Alexa, reorder Purina cat food.” Alexa responds: “I’ve found Purina cat food. Would you like to buy it?”

A top European Central Bank policymaker has joined calls for a global clampdown on virtual currencies such as bitcoin because of their threat to financial stability.

Yves Mersch, a member of the ECB’s executive board, said the central bank shared the views voiced by Agustín Carstens, the head of the Bank for International Settlements, who on Monday condemned bitcoin as “a combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster”.

After analyzing data for counties in 25 states containing the centers, analysis found no increase in overall employment in the counties

States and cities have fallen over themselves to offer huge tax breaks to Amazon in the hope of securing one of the tech giant’s order fulfillment centers. But an analysis of the impact of the centers released on Thursday found the facilities do not boost overall employment in the counties where they open.

Stunt generates $10m for billionaire’s personal hobby despite warnings from Home Office and US politicians

Elon Musk’s fire sale of his Boring Company “flamethrowers” raised $10m, selling out all 20,000 units, despite warnings from the Home Office and US politicians.

The tech billionaire chief executive of Tesla, Space X and the Boring Company, tweeted on Thursday morning that all the $500 flamethrowers were sold out and that “all flamethrowers will ship with a complimentary Boring fire extinguisher”.

The open-source ledger behind bitcoin is touted as revolutionary for everything from banking to health, but the jury is still out

The speculation around cryptocurrencies has obscured the fact that blockchain, the decentralised, open-source ledger that drives bitcoin, could radically change how ownership is verified.

While the value of the main cryptocurrencies fluctuates, “blockchain” remains a lucrative buzzword that companies have found is a magnet for funding. But cutting through the hype, could blockchain technology really revolutionise the way anything from banking to education is run?

Tech giants are drawing political fire over fake news and Russian meddling

Nicholas Terry understands the internet’s darker side better than most. A history lecturer at Exeter University, Terry is an expert on antisemitism and runs a blog examining Holocaust denial and its dissemination online.

“You’ve got three separate phenomena converging,” he says. “One is the fake news stuff, promulgated by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, which is trying to promote specific false stories in real time for immediate impact; second, there’s the ideological bubble – people only reading leftwing or rightwing news sites; and then there’s this effort by fringe movements on Holocaust denial to make their websites look respectable and to hoodwink readers into thinking what they’re reading is OK.”